Austrian Law for the protection of literary and artistic property against unauthorised publication, reprinting and reproduction (1846)

&nbsp;

2. Abstract

The Copyright Act of 19 October 1846 was the first modern copyright legislation in Austria and was in force until it was replaced by the Copyright Act of 26 December 1895. The main provisions had been anticipated in the bilateral treaty between Austria and Sardinia (d_1840). The new statute covered just the hereditary lands of the Habsburg monarchy and so did not apply to Hungary or Transylvania.

&nbsp;

The author was invested with an exclusive right by this Act, which incorporated the copyright terms set out in the federal resolutions of 1837 (d_1837) - 30 years p.m.a. for printed works - and 1845 - 10 years p.m.a. for performing rights, as long as these had been explicitly reserved. An exclusive right to publish a translation could be reserved for one year (&sect; 5c). Likewise, music publishers and composers could reserve for one year the right to an &quot;arrangement or adaptation of a musical composition for different, or less, instruments&quot; . The restrictions on translations and musical compositions led to protests by publishers from both Austria and other member states of the German Confederation.

Copyright statement

You may copy and distribute the translations and commentaries in this resource, or parts of such translations and commentaries, in any medium, for non-commercial purposes as long as the authorship of the commentaries and translations is acknowledged, and you indicate the source as Bently & Kretschmer (eds), Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900) (www.copyrighthistory.org).

You may not publish these documents for any commercial purposes, including charging a fee for providing access to these documents via a network. This licence does not affect your statutory rights of fair dealing.

Although the original documents in this database are in the public domain, we are unable to grant you the right to reproduce or duplicate some of these documents in so far as the images or scans are protected by copyright or we have only been able to reproduce them here by giving contractual undertakings. For the status of any particular images, please consult the information relating to copyright in the bibliographic records.